SOMEHOW
BY GREG STOLZE
The first time Duce Carter saw Ofelia Chase,
he wanted to kill her. More than that, though, he wanted to annihilate her, wanted to violate her, wanted to do something to her so awful there was no name for it, some obscene, absurd, overblown punishment for her temerity, for daring to exist in the same place as he did. Instant, total loathing. That’s how he knew she was a vampire.
He blew it off and put on an easy smile. He cleared his throat to get her attention and kept the smile going as she instinctively snarled at him. The man across the table from her twitched, clearly uneasy.
speed date men, or the glances of interest or intimidation or both commingled from the speed date women.
The singles were taking their five minute turns in a Holiday Inn conference room, with a few pathetic flower arrangements trying to make it less sterile and more fun. Duce told himself that he’d never hunt in this terrain even if the alternative was starvation. He knew, of course, that if push came to shove he would.
He left for the bar. It was better, and he’d gotten a phone number by the time Ofelia entered. She gave him a suspicious glance, hesitated, but sat down by him.
“It’s all right,” Duce told him. “She’s not mad at you.” “Um,” the guy said. “This is . . . uh . . . ”
“I’m her old boyfriend,” Duce said, tipping her a wink. “I’m sorry to interrupt and everything.”
“This is his five minutes,” Ofelia said, even as a woman with a clipboard and a strained smile came over to ask if Duce needed any help. Her tone told him she was silently praying that he was not going to make a scene, was not going to kick up a fuss, was not going to disrupt this evening’s round of speed dating.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Duce said. “I’m very sorry.” He let the woman with the clipboard pull him away, and he enjoyed her relief as much as her nervousness, much as he enjoyed the looks of curiosity or sour competitiveness from the
“Duce Carter,” he said, shaking her hand.
“Ofelia,” she replied. Her skin was lighter than his, but not by much. Her features, however, were sharper, more typically white. There was a dusting of darker freckles on her straight nose, and on her cheekbones.
“You can do better, right?” he said. “I mean, sure, you can . . . ” “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.” Her voice was sharp.
“Now, now, sister. Don’t purse your lips and schoolteach at me,” he said. “I’m just observing, all right?”
“Checking out the new meat on the street, is that it?”
“No need to make everything sound ugly. You and me, we have our needs, and if we’re not meeting them together, we should at least keep out of each other’s way.”
áyouäre trying to be courteous?à
áyou ainät making it easy.à
He gave her a smile. He turned on the charm. She thawed a little, he could tell.
“You’re new,” he said. “I saw you at court, and I was going to introduce myself, but your Crone crew seemed to be keeping you under pretty tight wraps. Your sire finally let you off the hook to try something on your own?”
“Not quite.” It was a new voice that spoke, one marginally feminine and entirely humorless. It was unexpected and unpleasantly close to Duce’s ear.
He did not flinch in surprise. He turned and kept the smile working as he said, “Moyra. Didn’t see you there.”
“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re trying to do,” Moyra hissed. Her face was tight with anger.
“You might want to check your tone,” Duce said. His face was still mild and pleasant, but he put a little steel behind his words.
“Keep away from my offspring, Douche.”
“Put the fangs away, Moyra. They’re making you lisp.”
Moyra ground her teeth, and he grinned wider, and then
she grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him toward the back exit. “Wait!” Ofelia called, but Duce gave her a little wave.
“You wait,” he said. “One way or the other, I expect this won’t take long.”
They were barely out the door before Moyra took a swing at him, but Duce ducked it, giving his eyes a moment to adjust, making sure no one else was . . . .
Moyra had vanished.
“Aw shit,” Duce said, and got his arms up around his head before she reappeared, this time holding a board and swinging it into his side. Since his arms were already up, it was natural
to give her a series of quick jabs to the face, snapping her head back. Bruises rose on her
flesh and then faded as quickly as breath on a cold windowpane.
“This is stupid,” Duce said as they circled. “I know what you’re doing!”
She swung again, and this time he was ready. He grabbed the board and yanked hard, sending her face-first into a wall. “But do you know what you’re doing?” he asked, then grunted. He looked down and saw a throwing knife in his gut. “Bitch!” Now it was his turn with the board, and he cracked her on the skull, no subtlety, just rage and brute force.
It went like that for what seemed like a long time but was only a couple seconds before Duce realized that it was a pretty close fight. Moyra just might kill him. So he said, “This is really stupid,” again, and swung the board close enough to make her cringe,
but checked the blow.
Her face was badly bruised, and this time the marks weren’t fading. She had a second knife in her hand. Duce looked at it and dropped the board. He figured he could always pull the blade out of his stomach if he needed to rearm. But Moyra seemed to reach the same conclusion, that the match was too close to call, and her knife disappeared as quickly as she’d drawn it.
“You’re not going to take her away from me,” she said.
Duce grunted as he pulled out her weapon and closed his belly wound. “That sounds like a bet to me.”
When they went back inside, Ofelia was gone.
# # #
Initially, Duce hadn’t even wanted to go. A couple of older, respected Carthians had dropped by his place and shot the shit for
a while, watched some of the Duke game on TV, grumbled about the crazies in the Lancea Sanctum. Then they’d gotten to the point.
“She’s a Crone neonate, just brought in during the Indulgence,” Pete said. Pete was gruff, blue-jeaned, wearing
a truck-stop cap and a Teamsters ring. He had clout. “Knock her.”
“Aw c’mon,” Duce said. “You can’t expect me to just walk on by, give her a wink and bring her into the Movement. Be real.”
“This is real,” the other Carthian said. Her name was Brenda, and she was from the intellectual wing, dressed in Elizabeth Arden and wearing
jade earrings that clashed with
her shoes. “The recently Embraced are the most vulnerable to recruitment, and that’s especially
true of the Circle, where the, the spiritual milieu is alien and therefore alienating . . . ”
W h i l e s h e p r a t t l e d , Pete dropped a folder on Duce’s table. Duce opened it,
still grumbling.
“Why do I have to do it. Just last month I . . . ” He saw her picture and
grimaced. “Oh, it’s like that.”
“No, it’s not,” said Brenda as Pete shrugged and said, “I guess.”
“To lure away the black Acolyte, you figure you need your go-to brother . . . ”
“We can talk around race all night,” Brenda said, “But we’ll never get around it. She’s just started her Requiem, she’s scared, she’s alone, anything fa-
miliar might . . . ”
“What the hell is biomolecular chemistry?” Duce asked. “I’m curious ‘cause, y’know, when I got my GED in the slammer they skipped that class, and she’s got a PhD in it.”
“How would I know?” Pete asked. “You gonna do this thing or not?”
“Do I have to?”
Brenda and Pete exchanged a glance. Pete looked down at his ring and turned it so the face was in.
“No,” the union man said coolly. “Not at all. No big thing.”
Duce saw her a couple times over the course of six months, and he played it very cool. His initial plan at speed dat-
ing had been to charge in, be pushy and fly and street, everything he figured a nice, black intellectual from the suburbs would despise, then throw
up his hands in defeat to Pete and Brenda. “Hey, I tried,” he would tell them.
Moyra though. Moyra pissed him off. Moyra made him want to
recruit Ofelia, not because the Movement was so wonderful that everyone should be Carthian, but because if he succeeded, then Moyra would fail.
(The loser of their bet would wind up admitting defeat in a public Elysium in front of no fewer than a dozen other vampires. Not a pretty result. If he won, Duce planned to let Moyra slide on it, in return for some less humiliating concession down the line. He was
pretty sure he couldn’t lose, since at any point he could just say, “She hasn’t joined the Movement — yet.” He couldn’t figure why Moyra had let him leave the bet wide open, no time limit. Maybe she’d been careless because of greed and anger. Or maybe she just wasn’t that bright.)
Moyra made him go the distance, so Duce was there after Ofelia’s first kill, there to wipe her tears and dump quicklime on the body. Duce was there the first night she had to run away from her family, and as she had to draw further away from them. He didn’t say much, but he did a lot, and most of all, he was there.
They were driving up to the northern suburbs when Duce deemed the time right for his next escalation. He was doing her one more meaningful favor.
“I really appreciate this,” she said. “No big thing.”
“It is. It is, really.”
“It only looks that way to you. I’ve got all kinds of people in my corner, this was nothing.”
There was a pause, and he was about to change the subject when she spoke again.
“What if it goes wrong though? I mean, these aren’t
— ordinary mortals.”
“Nothing’s going to go wrong.”
“If they find out what we really are . . . ”
“They won’t find out. Who’d suspect?” He grinned and straightened the black-and-white priest’s collar around his neck. Ofelia shifted, uncom-
fortable in her nun’s wimple.
“What if they ask me a question about religion?” she said. “I’m an — I was an Episcopalian. I don’t know anything about this Catholic mumbo-jumbo.”
“One, anyone who asks a nun a question about religion isn’t going to know the difference if you give him some vague line of jive. Two, anyone who does know enough about religion to recognize bullshit isn’t going to feel any need to get answers from a nun. And three,” he said, raising a finger as she opened her mouth to argue, “I specifically asked Pete to get you the habit used by the Sisters of Saint Perpetua,
who all take a vow of silence.
“Oh.”
“You all right with letting me do the talking?” “I guess I have to be.”
They drove another mile before Ofelia said, “I don’t know why Moyra asked me to do this.”
“Probably hoping you screw it up.” “What?”
“You yourself said this isn’t your bag, you don’t have the skills. She probably wants you to touch the fence and get the shock.”
“Moyra wouldn’t . . . ” Ofelia realized what she was about to say, and
didn’t. “Why would she do that?”
“You want my guess? It’s so she can rescue you and
drag you in front of the Prince for discipline. She won’t suggest
that, of course. She’ll fight it, to make some Invictus patsy think she’s afraid of it, so he’ll push for it and she’ll cave in and you’ll spend an evening with Prince Maxwell Clarke.”
“But why would she want that?”
“Oh, maybe because you’re the Prince’s dream girl.” “Get off,” she said, looking out the window.
“Ofelia, it’s only, uh, hidden if you don’t know the Prince. Moyra told you what, that she Embraced you for your brains? Your
shiny doctorate in bio-whatever?” “Something like that.”
“It’s even true, as far as it goes, but only because Prince Maxwell is bent for the smart ones. ‘Ladies of accomplishment,’ he calls ’em. Look at Persephone, he was so taken he brought her into the fold.”
“Who’s Persephone?”
“The bitchy, white-girl vampire, young, dresses like Vogue?”
“You’ll have to narrow it down,” Ofelia said, then shook her head. “No, forget it. This is just too — too much.
Maxwell is supposed to fall in love with me? A 200-year-old vampire?”
“I don’t think it’s the greatest plan in the world, but look at the women that the Prince sends out for. Classical musicians, college instructors, architects — hell, he sent Garret way out to the suburbs to reel in some woman after he read something she
wrote in Poetry magazine.”
Duce let it sink in. No rush. Still 15 minutes from their destination, in traffic.
“So what’s supposed to happen then?” Ofelia asked.
“Who knows? Prince Maxwell has done some, y’know, ill-
advised things. Embracing Persephone, there’s Exhibit A on how he loses his head over a smart gal
of a certain age.”
When they had 10 minutes left, he added, “Plus, you know, there’s the matter of race.”
“Moyra may be ruthless, but please give her credit for some brains,” Ofelia snapped. “You really think she’s stupid enough to think this
Prince and I will get alongbecause weäre black?
“There’s a difference between stupid and ignorant,” Duce said. “I don’t know Moyra like you do, but I get the sense that her knowledge of black culture pretty much ended with that darky chef on the Cream of Wheat box. Know what I mean?”
Ofelia laughed, but it was a little bit bitter. Duce was pleased. As he pulled in, he thought about leaving well enough alone, but he couldn’t resist one last twist of the knife.
“The Circle’s got a lot on the ball, sure,” he said. “But no one’s ever accused ’em of being sen-
sitive.”
•••
Two months after that, he was ready to seal the deal. He was keeping her comfort-
able, telling her all the consoling stuff, but only about a third of his attention was on what he was saying. An equal amount was patting himself on the back over, really, how easy she’d been. The remainder was reveling in what he
might ask Moyra to do, how magnanimous he’d be, what a good sport —
“Duce, are you even listening to me?”
“The Carthians are all about feedback,” he said automatically, then looked into her eyes and said, “Ofelia, relax. Yeah, the Circle isn’t going to be happy you left, but they know better than to make a big hissy fit over it. That just draws attention to their inability to keep their people happy, makes more new recruits think about finding the closest U-Haul depot. It just makes anyone who’s got New Age leanings anywhere else decide the Circle isn’t cool enough to join, awright?”
“I want to be safe.”
“And I’ve promised you that you will be. Look, John, here’s a badass,” he said, lowering his voice. “I’ve seen him tear a Daeva legbreaker to pieces like a fat man eating a roast chicken. As for Lucinda, you don’t even want to know what she’s got up her sleeve,” Duce said, thinking that it wasn’t much because the Carthians were really, truly confident that the Acolytes would write Ofelia off. Maybe with some bitchy comments and vicious gestures, but, at the end of the night, it was no cakewalk to keep a vampire in a political party by force. Especially if the vampire was supposed to be good for
anything after being compelled.
“You think I’m over reacting Duce, but I’m not. The Acolytes . . . ”
“The Acolytes are a clique of mini-cults so politically fragmented they can’t even set a coherent meeting time. Trust me, they’re not going to take on a covenant that was, until fairly recently, running the
whole damn town.”
“You don’t know how strong the Circle is,” she whispered, looking out his window into rainy darkness.
“But I know how strong our chains are,” he said, taking her hands. He had time to congratulate himself on a
good line
When he heard the door open
Both Duce and Lucinda swiveled their heads towards the noise. John was too slow, which meant that he only got partially strobed by a sudden, brilliant light.
“Shit!” Lucinda cried as, a second later, the sound hit them. Just a single sharp bang, a firecracker probably, but enough to disorient even human senses. For creatures with eyes and ears of far superior sensitivity, it was devastating, if
only for a moment. A moment was all they needed.
Duce released Ofelia to draw a knife out of his coat pocket. Looking back on it, he would realize that was his big mistake. But it was his instinct to let go, to
be free to move, to not encumber himself with another.
“Ofelia!” Duce had time to see Moyra fade in and grab her childe, he had time to reach for her before they disappeared. They slid from his sight, like when a fly is buzzing around the room, and, despite focused attention, the eye loses track when the fly wanders in front of a dark surface. He looked and looked but couldn’t get his sight on them. John lunged to close the door even as Duce heard the susurrus of rain increase, felt a draft from the window that had been closed and then they were gone.
•••
“Will you see me?” Ofelia asked. The phone connection was bad, there was crackling and static, but even over that Duce could hear something broken in her words.
“Of course, shit, are you all right?”
“Meet me at the Tower, okay? Nine-thirty?”
There were spiders in her eyes. Tiny white ones, in the iris. When she blinked, they changed position.
“They put them there,” she whispered. “They see what I see. Moyra said . . . ” She swallowed hard as redness welled up in her eyes, around the brown and the unholy white. “She said, ‘See if they want you now. See if they’ll clasp a spy to them. She if they’re still welcoming, now that you’re worthless to everyone else.’”
“Shh, it’s okay now.”
“Sure, baby, whatever you say,” Duce replied, but he was uneasy. The Sears Tower wasn’t friendly, wasn’t right, and the Kindred stayed away. Probably why she picked it.
When he first saw her, he didn’t recognize her. Her posture was different. Now she was slumped, and at first he thought she was some homeless, until a cab passed and he saw the silhouette of high heels and a knee-length skirt.
“Hey,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder, turning her so he could hug her. Then he stopped.
“She said, ‘See if they want you now that you’re claimed.’”
“Hush. We do.” His dead skin crawled as he pulled her close, but he hugged her anyway. He didn’t know how the Movement could bring her in, how she could take part when everything they said went straight to Moyra, but he didn’t care about that. Ofelia wasn’t a trophy any more. She was someone who needed the Carthians the way he once had, the way they all once had, and he didn’t care about winning — for the first time, he cared about her.
áweäll make this work,à he said. áSomehow.à
By Ray Fawkes, Matthew McFarland, Ian Price, and Greg Stolze
Vampire® created by Mark Rein•Hagen